1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image capturing device, and more particularly to the image capturing device capable of converting a captured image into a characteristic image, and simplifying a characteristic value set in the characteristic image to lower the memory requirements of the image capturing device and save the computing resources, and a control method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, electronic products come with increasingly lower prices and more powerful functions due to severe market competitions. Wherein, an object detection function has been introduced into various different image capturing devices such as digital still cameras, digital cameras, monitors and camera phones with different applications including human face recognition as well as recognitions of pedestrians, license plates, motor vehicles or other objects. However, an image capturing device with the object detection function generally requires lots of memories to store data such as human face characteristic templates and consumes a huge computing resource, so that the cost of the image capturing device will be increased significantly.
The aforementioned situation becomes more significant for compact handheld camera devices. With the consideration of costs, the resources of the compact handheld camera devices are very limited, particularly in the use of memories, since a high-end memory is expensive. Therefore, if it is necessary to integrate the objective detection function into the compact handheld camera device, the memory requirement is increased significantly, and the manufacturing cost is affected directly and the product competitiveness is dropped.
Therefore, it is an important issue for manufacturers to develop an image capturing device with the object detection function capable of saving the hardware cost of the image capturing device without affecting the accuracy of detecting the object.